With excerpts from Goethe's diary, sketches and engravings, this film follows Goethe's Italian Journey through Rome, Naples and Pompeii.

A documentary crew follows the December 1978 “big repair” at the Bernburg (Saale) cement works, normally shut only for maintenance, where management has cut the planned 16-day turnaround to 14, with a 15 000 M bonus (rising to 20 000 M if finished a day early). As cameras roll through cement dust, crew and workers discuss the twice-yearly overhaul, familiar crews, and gritty camaraderie. They learn that chronic spare-parts shortages force constant improvisation, and that bureaucratic red tape weighs heavier than the hardest labor. Amid pride in their long-running plant, workers confess simple hopes for health, peace, and family. By film’s end, the crew realizes the true “core” of the factory lies not in its machinery, but in its people’s hands and minds.

A farmer receives land from the king and discovers a buried golden mortar. He decides to give it to the king out of gratitude, but his clever daughter warns him that the king will surely want him to bring a corresponding pestle as well. When the king throws the farmer into jail for fraud, he bemoans the fact that he did not listen to his daughter.

Bad planning and shortages prevail on an East German construction site. Foreman Hannes Balla uses unconventional methods to overcome the problems. New Socialist Unity Party secretary Werner Horrath is charged with bringing the rough-and-ready builder crew into line. The task seems doomed to fail as the two men compete for the affections of young engineer Kati Klee. But when she gets pregnant by married man Horrath, he is in danger of being expelled from the party, and Balla takes his side...

The film describes the activity of an ABV of the People's Police in its section in East Berlin. A mixture of “positive” characters from the beginning, the extensively staged “owl”, who is introduced as a criminal and over the course of time, especially due to the influence of the ABV, develops into a good citizen, and incorrigible characters, with whom the ABV fails with its extensive attempts at rehabilitation and who are arrested after having committed again offenses.

The "Concordia" trading company in Würzburg is a secret headquarters of the MID, a secret service agency of the US Army. For years, espionage, sabotage, and diversion operations originated from here in order to undermine the Socialist Republic of Germany. A favorable moment for a military attack approaches and plans are developed. These plans are placed in the hands of Major Collins, who keeps them in a safe. Hansen has worked for him for many years, but also for the Stasi as a double agent. Security Chief Colonel Rock knows there is a leak, but Hansen has passed every test thrown at him. He is trying to deal with his current assignment: acquiring the plans so they can be made public. His mission is to get them out of the safe and into the GDR without getting caught.

The evil and powerful King Magus brutally subjugates the people of his kingdom. Anyone who does not want to submit is turned into an animal and locked in a cage. Magus kidnaps the girl Hanna, whom he wants to marry. But Hanna refuses, and her lover, the shepherd Elias, goes to the castle to free her. He learns from Magus' servant Pravos that a mirror gives the king magic power and immortality and that he can only be defeated by water from the Moon Lake. Elijah sets out on his journey to the Moon Lake. Will he withstand the dangers and finally achieve victory over the king? Wrid he be able to free Hanna and the whole kingdom?

After a breakdown, Rita returns to her childhood village in 1961. As she recovers, she remembers the past two years: her love for the chemist Manfred, ten years her senior; how his enthusiasm about his new chemical process turned to bitter disappointment in the face of official rejection; how he escaped to West Berlin a few weeks before the Wall was built and hoped that she would follow him …

Hans Fallada tells in his published after the war novel "The drinker" the story of the agricultural wholesaler Erwin Sommer, who flees from his narrow bourgeois relations under the burdens of the new times in the kingdom of the king alcohol, whose liberty and independence promises prove a lie - the only truth of the alcohol. On behalf of the WDR television play Ulrich Plenzdorf has adapted Fallada's 1944/45 novel for a film adaptation by Tom Toelle with Harald Juhnke in the main role of Erwin Sommer.

Berlin, 1948: Paralyzed and robbed of her memory, Fleur regains consciousness after a serious fall. The doctor treating her recognizes that her problem is of a psychological nature and encourages her to face up to her past. The daughter of a brothel owner is reluctant to look back: on a hapless childhood, her relationships with bon vivant Dr. Goldner and the politically committed locksmith Philipp (Hilmar Thate) as well as the difficult period of fascism... This exciting journey into the German past is based on Dinah Nelken's novel "Das angstvolle Heldenleben einer gewissen Fleur Lafontaine".